Many of today's communication systems, such as third generation (3G), fourth generation (4G), and fifth generation (5G) mobile networks provide services to mobile devices or user equipment (UE) using a cellular or mobile network with a plurality of geographically distributed base stations or nodes. As a user equipment moves in and around the nodes, it becomes important to track the location of the user equipment and determine which of the nodes will act as the serving node for the user equipment. Traditional approaches have relied on the user equipment to take the primary responsibility for determining where the user equipment is topologically located in the network and to help select the serving node. These approaches typically placed an expensive computational burden on the user equipment and often required the user equipment to exchange multiple messages with multiple nearby nodes before selecting the serving node. These exchanges often placed a significant burden on the power budget for the user equipment as well as the bandwidth of the network. In addition, the user equipment's choice of serving node may occur at the expense of overall network capability and/or efficiency.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide systems and methods for improving the tracking of user equipment in a mobile network and the selection of a serving node for each user equipment.